Toxine
My father came to spend much of his time in a sanatorium near Bournemouth, and I found it necessary, after so long an absence, to re-enter the world and attend to our affairs. The shop was in decrepitude; and I, who had been so prodigal with my inheritance, was in debt. In hope of mitigating the urgent but atrocious task of becoming a penny-wise bourgeois, I advertised for an assistant. The salary was meagre and, to compensate, the incumbent was to be offered free lodgings. The boxroom above the shop—the room that had been my boyhood studio—would be suitable. I saw only one applicant.
It was as I climbed a stepladder, my back to the door, to dust a row of ‘Waverley’ novels, that the air filled with the scent of oil, ball bearings and the mildewy aroma of cat. I turned, and the recognition was terrible. Name, Height, Age, Weight, Distinguishing Characteristics. Beata Beatrix! No; but almost, almost. The exterior had been maltreated: raven hair, shorn and punkishly spiky; depraved chocolate-box face (that same face of Dresden china) ill-used; and the clothes—a flamboyant display of Oxfam chic—were appalling. But I saw beyond these ravages into the sacred heart of her design. And it was unflawed. Her languid, Art Nouveau lines had been traced from a drawing by Mucha; her eyes, feline and tinged with corruption, were like emeralds set by Lalique into the head of an ivory nymph; and when she moved it was with a stiff robotic gait, accompanied by an almost audible whirr of clockwork. (My expertise with artificial limbs informed me that, beneath those full-length skirts, she sported callipers. I later learned that polio, contracted while on holiday abroad, was the cause.) An unwomanly eighteen-year-old, with childish hips and breasts, she had runaway from home to live in a Golborne Road squat ‘full of bizarros and rififi. And I’ve had enough of bizarro boys,’ she’d sigh. ‘I’m no sideshow. What’s that? Was I safe? Tell it to Johnny. Tell it to Johnny Impaler.’ Tina, or Tinkerbell, or Tink, as she claimed her friends called her (‘because I’m just so mignonesque’) was thus grateful for the asylum the job offered and was soon resident above the shop. Each day, as I watched her totter about like an expensive toy slightly damaged, I radicalized my methodology. I knew, now, the way ahead.
This was the illumination: Pygmalion had been wrong. I should not have sought to give life to stone and metal, but endeavoured to raise mankind to the level of the machine. The beloved had returned in a moment of grace; she lay within that human frame, moaning to be free. It would only take me to subvert the host body, to discipline and correct its imperfections, to mechanize it, and Toxine would again be mine. Scruples? No; I pitied Tink. Not for what I was to do to her; I pitied her the burden of her humanity. After closing up shop Tink and I sometimes drank at a nearby wine bar called the V. Berg. Once, when she had got very drunk, I learned that, like me, she was motherless. Slurred Tink, the sad and crippled, who was never to talk so again: ‘It all began when Mummy died. I was thirteen. At first—when he touched me—he’d make a joke of it. Sometimes he’d say he was sorry and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the day. Then things got bad. Serious. He said how much he missed Mum, how much I was like her. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . . His way of loving me, he said. And I always thought it was me doing wrong instead of him. Then one day—Pow! Zap! Crash! I broke everything in the house. And I wrote in lipstick on the wall: Impaler! Impaler! Then I left. Just got up and left . . .’
Unhappy sister. Too well she knew the sadness of the flesh. I would lie awake, alone in the sterile vastness of my house, and think of her, also alone, in that doll-sized room above the shop, and dreaming, what? That she would never go to the ball? That no prince fair would kiss her rosy lips? I would save her. I would elect her to the mechanical realm, where there is neither tears nor pain. And there I would love her, for through her glowed the luminous soul of Toxine.
I began work. ‘Coffee, Tink?’ I asked the evening I closed shop for ever. An hour later she rested beneath a mountain of barbiturate-induced sleep. I carried her to her room and stood at her bedside, trembling. A colossal wardrobe loomed above us, an accusing sentinel, the room otherwise bare. Like a cast, the human part of her had fallen away; what was left was an Ur-Toxine, a neglected masterpiece to be retouched and restored. How beautiful she was, deconstructed, bereft of sense and pain; but more beautiful by far was her potential. She would put on a new skin of alabaster; the hair would again flow as a black subterranean stream; and the eyes, reigniting like green lanterns, would guide me home. Secure behind locked doors, I removed her clothes and measured her for conversion.
I did not dare transport Tink to my workshop; I feared the curiosity of the mob; and so, as she slept, dosed with whatever I could buy from the dealers of Brixton and Piccadilly, I set to transforming our bolthole into the studio it had once been. Day and night I ferried equipment, Chepstow—Portobello, until Tink’s room was a satanic mill primed to realize my desires. Though I removed the wardrobe I had still to knock down a connecting wall into an adjacent bathroom to accommodate the influx of machinery (a fraction of my total stock); but, despite this lack of space, I proceeded unhindered. Arms, legs, torso arrived from my contractors, while I, as always, concentrated on the microengineered nerves and sinews that would allow my china doll to walk. Part of my conversion therapy entailed keeping Tink in a persistent vegetative state: the higher functions of the cerebral hemispheres repressed; the reflexes in the brain stem intact. When fitted with the carapace of reinforced porcelain that was to be her bodysuit, her feeblest movement would activate the touch-feedback relays in the joints, providing the genius of animation. Her sensorium undermined by drugs, I theorized that her reflexes would be susceptible to posthypnotic suggestion; that, indoctrinated while she slept she would, when tossed a scrap of consciousness, obey my commands. At least, so I theorized. My métier was engineering; I had always felt distaste for the life sciences; and my thoughts on how the mechanization of her body might prejudice her executive will were, I suppose, fanciful. I knew only she must never, never wake. Not fully. To regulate her somnolence, the exoskeleton was to incorporate a motorized drip and a catheter, to feed my pretty zombie a liquid diet of vitamins, protein and soporifics: a regimen for a new body, a new life; a life to be afforded every luxury. Her second skin would be lined with velvet and tailored so that no moving part chafed the soft engine inside; a waste-disposal unit would be discreetly placed. As she evolved beneath my fingers, I imagined myself presenting her with bouquets of rose and poppy, a red limousine, a retinue of cats (cat-maid, cat-butler, cat-chauffeur); I would deny her nothing.
